|
|||||||||
|
|||||||||
|
 |
APA Voters and Conservatives: Why are "They" So Afraid of "Us"?Conservatives' knee-jerk lashing out at Asian bloc-voting denies facts and opportunities that should be good news for them
In a recent attack on the 80-20 Initiative -- a national, bloc-voting
Asian-American P.A.C. -- The National Review Online's "If You're API and
You Know It...vote Democratic?" (Aug. 12) offers a smorgasbord of half-baked
half-truths, misinformational tidbits stewed in fuzzy math, dollops of paranoia,
and a few raw lies in the half-shell. End to end, the column misuses OMB race
classifications, misreads Census 2000 data, mistakes the Census term "Asian" as
synonymous with "Asian Pacific Islander American", miscalculates the national
"Asian Pacific" population, misplaces “Native Hawaiians/Pacific Islanders”
entirely, misidentifies "Arabs" as part of Census 2000's "Asians", and "misunderestimates"
even the "White" category. Frankly, columnist John Derbyshire misses
pretty much everything related to his topic since, as he admits, he can’t
quite grasp "whatever 'API' signifies".
Good News for GOP, but Why Don't They See It?The frustration powering Derbyshire's assault on APAs is his apparent conviction that the GOP has lost the whining Orientals' swing vote already and inevitably, and no use trying further. Although not founded in any actual facts, this conservative perception of APAs as a “lost cause” is a dangerous self-fulfilling prophecy. It risks creating an even greater disconnect between us as a community and our government should Mr. Bush recapture the White House. And what is the basis for this conclusion, anyway? Clearly, it is not based on any sound statistics on our collective political behavior. APAs collectively did not vote for Bill Clinton -- twice. Disenchanted with Democrats for good reason during a decade of fundraising scandals and Wen Ho Lee, we gave them only 36% of our two-party vote in 1992 and 47% in 1996. Yet, in 2000, we had the wherewithal to examine our positions afresh and cross party lines to Gore, despite past animosities. In short, we swung. Further, exit polls show APAs were the only “race” group to switch party allegiances in 2000, making us an “X-Factor” more analogous to the equally nebulous “White Suburban Soccer Moms” than to traditionally Democratic-leaning African Americans. The most current and reliable national poll of APA opinion, commissioned by New California Media, reports a whopping 20% of APAs remain "Undecideds". There's no evidence that APAs can't "swing back" in 2004. All of this should be good news for Republicans. But ideologues like Derbyshire always distrust independence – in action, thought or expression. “Swing” voters, new voters, youth voters make them nervous. For them, blaming 2000's leftward-shift on Confucius or "Socialism" or self-pity over 19th century European imperialism in Asia is more palatable than the truth. Namely: we were independent enough to swing to the candidate whose platform we deemed to be in our best self-interest at the time. Any GOP strategist wondering why most of us supported Senior and Dole but not Dubbya, and why pan-APA bloc-voting is increasingly popular, should really stop listening to ideologues and consider that the answer may lie a little closer to home than stereotypical gongs struck half a world away. For this, too, can be good news for Republicans: Asian Americans have pursued coalition-building and bloc-voting strategies because we are tired of being mistaken for Asian Asians or taken for granted as “honorary whites,” and above all tired of being ignored as Asian Americans by all political parties.
Snubbed in the U.S.A.In 2000, neither major campaign’s APA outreach was impressive. The “minority outreach managers” complained we were too fragmented, too small, “too hard to reach”. In theory, non-aligned groups like 80-20 should make “sit-down chats with us” easier. This year, another major group emerged, NCAPA, an umbrella for 21 national nonpartisan, non-profit community organizations. NCAPA and 80-20 both circulated (very different) platforms to all major campaigns that compiled and digested concerns of diverse APAs of all sub-ethnicities, national origins, classes and ideological persuasions: It was just shy of a “roadmap” to the Asian vote. So what happened? Bush/Cheney 2000 had won points with many APA voters for its efforts to respond to and engage with 80-20, IMDiversity.com and other groups, showing the respect of explaining why Bush thought he should be our preferred candidate. This year, however, was very different. In 2004, every Democratic primary contender except for Al Sharpton responded immediately and affirmatively to 80-20’s three-point platform urging research of and enforcement against glass ceiling discrimination. Ralph Nader’s independent campaign also embraced these “planks”. Yet, to date, Mr. Bush has been the sole major contender to choose not to reply to – much less agree to – the three short checkbox items. As of this writing, a Bush/Cheney 2004 representative could similarly not be spared to discuss the platform concerns painstakingly outlined in NCAPA’s Call To Action: Platform for Asian Pacific Americans - National Policy Priorities 2004. Invited to sit down with an organized swing community that had overwhelmingly voted to re-elect his father, the campaign to re-elect this President Bush was a flat-out no-show. It chose to RSVP with only its silence, and its lapdog media with derision. By contrast, having learned from Gore’s and Clinton's fumbles, the Kerry/Edwards camp was all over the NCAPA offering; it was able to learn about, and thus position itself very favorably on many if not all our top concerns. Seizing the opportunity to meet with nonpartisan representatives of 21 communities was for Kerry a no-brainer, but for Bush a non-starter. Again I ask, why?
Nonpartisan Means NonpartisanOne problem is, for all its representative scope, a diverse umbrella non-profit like NCAPA has exactly zero direct political power. It can't endorse, can't fundraise, it can only advise: gather "suggestions" for problems the members of its constituent affiliate organizations want the next President to address. It can't even announce that its efforts were ignored by one party for fear of being attacked as "partisan" and having its NPO status threatened. Attacks and threats are becoming the standard M.O. these days. The National Federation of Filipino American Associations, a nonpartisan NPO, was forced to issue an apology for charges "that it appeared partisan," not because it's true, but because it had to after Filipino Republicans complained about a supposed Democratic bias at its September convention. The offense? A suggestion that (gasp!) entrenched Asian Republicans could and should use their influence with the party that controls all three branches of our Federal government and a majority of states to push for passage of the Filipino Vets Bill -- hardly a "Lefty concern". During its Sept. 19 endorsement convention, 80-20 was similarly targeted for attacks that proved to be wrong-headed and ultimately self-defeating. Expecting that 80-20 would endorse Kerry after its meeting, Asian Republican leaders preemptively contacted Chinese language press earlier hours before the schedule announcement to defuse and spin the endorsement. The claim, like Derbyshire's, was that if 80-20 endorsed Kerry (or theoretically Nader, who also sent a representative), it could not possibly be because it preferred his platform and/or because the Bush campaign snubbed the group; it must because 80-20 president S.B. Woo was a sneaky Lefty spy in swing-voter's clothing duping the members. The irony is, 80-20's endorsement decision had been delayed anyway. Angry over a slight by the Kerry camp -- perceived to be taking the group's support for granted -- delegates chose to delay and reassess the endorsement decision for two weeks. One can only speculate how the group's mood might have swung just then if only important Asian Republicans like Elaine Chao and Matt Fong were less busily occupied "staying on-message" and on the attack, and more interested in meeting with the group to find and negotiate common-ground on a single nonpartisan position or two. Well, we'll never know. Ultimately, duh, 80-20 went on to unanimously endorse -- "with reservations" -- the only major party candidate who could be bothered to show up. It didn’t have to be this way, of course. As George H. Bush and Bob Dole could attest, the Asian American vote in 2000 was frankly the GOP’s to lose -- and last time it did. If it happens again in 2004, it will be because the party's leading opinion-makers couldn’t even bother trying to sit and get to know a thing about us at all. Or maybe they were just afraid to. Either way, it's bad news: for "them" and "us".
Readings of Related Interest
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
